I thought I would do a little experimenting with creating a transparent photo relief in acrylic just to see what that might look like. In the process I found out something about PhotoVCarve that I wish applied to the other VCarve programs. Because I have yet to arrive at a good speed/feed combination for the tooling I am using I am relegated to .035 in. per pass to prevent melting and gumming things up. I cut the reliefs to .105 in. depth so the process requires 3 passes. PhotoVCarve does this on each line individually until the line is complete before stepping into the next line. The time savings is HUGE compared to VCarve completing each pass layer over the entire project before stepping down for each subsequent pass.

The photo is a black and white of my mother-in-law taken around 1948. It was a little grainy to begin with and that of course follows through. The first two pics are front and back of the second attempt done in sepia. The bottom pic exhibits some of the melting issues I had on my first attempt. The process definitely needs some tuning but now I have a pretty good idea of what can be accomplished.

Not sure what good they are but maybe they would make for unique Christmas tree ornaments. The actual pieces are a bit nicer than the photos of them. I am not all that good with a camera and finding a lighting scheme that does them justice is not easy.

To get the color I saturate clear epoxy with colorant and pour it onto the relief to achieve a gray scale effect; the deeper the relief the darker the tone.

I used a 0.25 mm radius ( .5 mm dia. ) tapered ball nose end mill for these. These are a two flute design and my problem is that they don't have very good chip disposition characteristics; at least as it relates to acrylic. I have since found a source for single flute radius tip V cutting/engraving tools. I have not yet ordered but I going to give them a try. Their geometry looks pretty promising.